Constructive competition: An experimental study on calibrating competitive intensity and winner selection rules

Winner-take-all tournaments may have the advantage of raising the motivation to do one’s best, but also the disadvantage of jeopardizing cooperation. Such tournaments can be costly in terms of loss of cooperation, and we ask: Are there conditions under which they don’t have these negative effects? Can competition be calibrated to be compatible with subsequent cooperation? There is one theory that deals with this question: the theory of constructive competition, based on the shifting salience of competitiveness. It includes attention to the rules by which the winner is selected but remains so far without much empirical evidence. We elaborated and tested this theory experimentally and confronted it with a rival theory about the negative effect of losing in the competition on subsequent cooperativeness. We find that the predictions from the shifting salience theory of constructive competition fit the empirical results well and that they outperformed those of the relative deprivation and frustrated loser theory.